Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age: A Sourcebook

By University of California Press

Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780520969100

Book preview

General Introduction

The Editors

Conversion constitutes one of the most important themes of premodern Islamic history, or indeed of world history in general. Islam is the only world religion whose name—al-islām—denotes not only a faith but also an act: that of submitting to the one true God and thereby becoming a Muslim. More broadly, we could hardly speak of Islamic societies, Islamic cultures, or Islamic civilizations without the prior decisions of countless individuals and groups across time to convert. Their choices have created a world in which around a quarter of the human population is now Muslim.

Conversion is a phenomenon of great complexity and, depending on one’s perspective, a cause for celebration, alarm, bemusement, or curiosity. This book’s purpose is to open a window for scholars, students, and general readers onto the historical antecedents that lie beneath these and myriad other modern perspectives on conversion to Islam. It gathers together, for the first time, some of the most vivid and neglected sources on conversion to Islam from the first millennium of Islamic history, in lands stretching from West Africa to China and from the Volga to South Asia, newly translated from languages as varied as Armenian and Malay.

ISLĀM AS CONVERSION ACROSS THE FIRST ISLAMIC MILLENNIUM

To grasp conversion’s significance across time, consider the vision of the Islamic world offered by the famous Moroccan writer Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who traveled across West Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the Far East during the fourteenth century.¹ Ibn Baṭṭūṭa was fascinated by the local expressions of Islam he encountered across this vast stretch of the earth. But he was also fascinated by Islam’s coherence. As he wandered from his native Tangiers to Timbuktu, Damascus, Tabriz, Samarqand, the Deccan, and Sumatra—places that had had little to do with one another prior to the emergence of Islam—he found a world held together by a common set of beliefs, languages, customs, and political structures that we might call generally Islamic.

These were societies characterized by reverence for the Qurʾān; the role of Arabic as a language of daily life, religion, and/or high culture; the division of time according to the five daily prayers and the sacred months; the presence of men and women of religion such as ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars), fuqahāʾ (jurists), and Sufis in their countless orders; the dominance of a patchwork of emirates, sultanates, and slave armies; and unique forms of transregional connectivity, such as the Meccan pilgrimage and scholarly travel (Ar. al-riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm). Together, these elements, common to so many of the Muslim communities Ibn Baṭṭūṭa observed in the course of his journeys, created a spiritual and cultural commonwealth of surprising unity in spite of its vast size and internal variety. In many ways, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa was the first chronicler of a global Islamic world.

Now imagine for a moment a fictional Muslim writer of an earlier age, the early eighth century, who, like Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, traversed vast distances in the hopes of meeting Muslims in far-flung corners of the globe.² Unlike Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, such a traveler could have journeyed from Córdoba to Alexandria, Jerusalem, Basra, Marw, and Sindh under the flag of a single Islamic empire. But Islamic imperial rule did not mean that the peoples within the borders of this state necessarily espoused Islam. Our traveler would have certainly met Muslims along the way, but they would have been relatively few in number and concentrated in a handful of cities and garrison towns. In the immense spaces in between—the rural areas where the majority of any population lived in premodern times—he would sometimes have found no Muslims at all.

In such places, the inhabitants were still Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews, Manicheans, Buddhists, and adherents of countless other ancient religions that kept on keeping on despite the political ruptures of the conquest. They also spoke a babel of tongues other than Arabic, including Greek, Aramaic, Coptic, Latin, Persian, Berber, Armenian, and Georgian. What is more, they continued to look to the traditions of numerous now-deposed kingdoms, such as those of the Romans, the Sasanians, the Visigoths, the Armenians, and the Sogdians, which had been swept away by the conquests. Thus, although he might have encountered faint outlines of the transregional Islamic culture Ibn Baṭṭūṭa observed centuries later, our traveler would not have described a recognizably Islamic world, but rather a fractured, largely non-Muslim cosmos much like the one that had existed in Late Antiquity.

The story of how the world of our eighth-century traveler became the world of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa is, in large part, a story of conversion to Islam and its long-term effects on many societies. This process, the people who experienced or witnessed it, and the sources they produced lie at the heart of the present book. This introduction provides context for the sources by sketching the larger story of premodern conversion to Islam and its major themes, by giving an overview of recent academic debates, and by guiding readers on how to use this book and benefit from its contribution to the growing literature on conversion in Islamic history.³

A THUMBNAIL SKETCH OF PREMODERN CONVERSION TO ISLAM AND ITS MAJOR THEMES

A Historical Overview of Premodern Conversion to Islam

The Prophet and the Empires of the Caliphs (600s–900s) Historians debate the extent to which Muḥammad and his companions insisted that the first people to respond to his message abandon their old ways. Much as many early Jewish followers of Jesus regarded him simply as the fulfillment of biblical covenants between God and the Jewish people, many passages in the Qurʾān and early sources by Muslim authors depict the Prophet not as the apostle of a new religion, but as a man through whom God would complete the Jewish and Christian monotheisms that had come before. Modern scholars have speculated that some of the Prophet’s earliest followers did not make a clean break with their Jewish and Christian identities.⁴ This was not the case, however, for the Arabian polytheists whom the sources portray as being dominant in the Prophet’s milieu. The Qurʾān and early reports about the Prophet’s life reflect little sympathy for or tolerance of Arabian polytheism. Conversion—which entailed rejection of the old Arabian gods as well as affirmation of the Prophet’s message—was thus imperative for most early members of the Prophet’s movement.

This, at least, is how the beginnings of Islam are portrayed in the vast majority of surviving sources. Like all such sources, however, the ones used by historians of Islam must be approached with both sympathy and healthy skepticism. Human events often happen in messier, more complex ways than written sources let on. Care is certainly warranted when studying early conversion to Islam, for which contemporary documents are almost nonexistent. Most of the extant narrative accounts of early conversion were written down decades or centuries later. Modern historians now increasingly believe that joining Muḥammad’s movement was less a story of sudden individual conviction or the decisive smashing of idols than one of tribal affiliations, military alliances, and gradual change among a mostly preliterate population.⁵ It seems, however, that most of the tribes and towns of the Arabian Peninsula had entered into some form of alliance with that movement by the time of the Prophet’s death in 632 CE, or shortly thereafter. Historians generally agree that for Arabians, making such an alliance entailed some affirmation of Muḥammad’s message: that the one true God was calling people, through His prophet, to worship Him alone; that a final Judgment Day was imminent; and that a sacred scripture bristling with allusions to salvation history and prescribed details of piety and worship had been revealed in the Arabic language. Only a few tribes, mostly outside Arabia proper, remained Christian for very long while also allying themselves with the Prophet’s movement; most broke fairly quickly with their previous communal loyalties. For this reason, the Arabians who carried out the stupendous military conquests of the ensuing decades would mostly have affirmed the basic Muslim profession of faith, the shahāda: There is no god but God; Muḥammad is the Messenger of God.

The Arabian tribesmen soon came to rule over a dizzying array of peoples within the borders of an empire that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to Central Asia. These groups espoused many different religious teachings in addition to Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism, the state religion of the Persian Sasanian Empire, which the conquerors quickly overran. Some of their beliefs, such as Manichaeism, are now all but forgotten, while others, such as Buddhism and other religions of Central and South Asia, are often overlooked when thinking about early Islam. In this early period, up to the fall of the Arab Umayyad dynasty in 132/750, relatively few non-Arabs converted to Islam. The people who did so were usually those who had thrown in their lot with the rulers of the new empire: individuals who joined the conquerors’ armies, settled in the quasi-colonial garrison cities they founded, or formally joined Arab tribes by becoming mawālī (sing. mawlā), or tribal clients, non-Arabs who entered Islamic society by becoming honorary or affiliate members of Arab kinship networks. Indeed, the non-Arab subjects of the empire, unlike the polytheists of Arabia, by and large experienced little pressure to convert. This was partly because some early Muslims regarded Islam as exclusively for Arabs, and partly because Muslim governors and rulers, or caliphs, valued the poll tax (jizya) that non-Muslims paid. This tax was reportedly lifted from converts by the pious Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 99–101/717–20). Non-Muslims who paid the poll tax, remained loyal to the new rulers, and showed public deference to Islam were generally permitted to continue living and worshipping more or less as they had done before the conquests.⁶ Muslim jurists referred to them as dhimmīs, or peoples possessing a pact of security, a category that included Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians.

The Umayyad dynasty was toppled in 132/750 by the revolt of the ʿAbbasids, a dynasty that was more closely related to the Prophet. The ʿAbbasids’ supporters had criticized the Umayyads for their alleged impiety and ethnic exclusivity. In the ʿAbbasid Empire, the rate of conversion to Islam appears to have picked up, even as the military conquests continued to slow. A steady flow of converts came from Zoroastrianism, which had now long been deprived of state support and splintered among a welter of abortive revivalist movements.⁷ Part of the reason for Iran’s seemingly rapid conversion, at least in its eastern reaches, lay in the tendency of Arab soldiers to settle among local populations. This pattern contrasted with that in southern Iraq, another area of intensive Arab settlement, where the Muslims sequestered themselves in garrison towns (Ar. amṣār). Christianity, too, seems to have experienced considerable attrition to Islam in some regions.⁸ It remained vibrant, however, even in the newly founded capital city of Baghdad, where Christians soon took to writing their scholarly works in Arabic, as their coreligionists in the monasteries of Palestine had begun doing a few decades earlier.⁹ But the conversion of more and more non-Arabs, coupled with the conquerors’ adoption of local customs and the spread of the Arabic language, narrowed the cultural gap between Muslims and local peoples across the empire.

This was also a time when larger numbers of signal converts began entering Islam. These were individuals of high social and economic standing—including officials, theologians, jurists, and literati of various sorts—who brought the expertise and cultural capital of their old communities into the new. On occasion, as under the ʿAbbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil in 236/851, they converted as a result of coercive state decrees that required non-Muslims to accept Islam or relinquish influential positions.¹⁰ Such converts served as important vectors for the transmission of ideas and practices into Muslim societies. Through them and within more established Muslim communities, Islam itself was becoming more complex, intellectually formidable, and widely attractive; the text of the Qurʾān, for example, was well established by the middle to late seventh century, and Islamic legal and doctrinal teachings were extensive and highly ramified by the early ʿAbbasid period.¹¹ The way was thus paved for conversion to gain pace, as Islam acquired more stable, impressive, and widely attractive intellectual and institutional forms than it had possessed in the immediate years after the Prophet’s life. Many scholars have argued that demographic majorities in some regions of the empire outside Arabia, particularly in Iran and North Africa, became Muslim during the first century of ʿAbbasid rule. These claims are disputed, however, and there is broad agreement that in other regions, such as Egypt and Syria, Muslims remained a demographic minority for a long time, and that the nature of the Islam espoused by converts in this early era was highly variable and sometimes quite vague (see further discussions in subsequent sections of this introduction).¹² Nevertheless, it is plain that becoming Muslim allowed converts not only to join the imperial elite and escape onerous taxes but also to fill deep psychological needs and forge ties of solidarity and sympathy across the largest empire the world had yet seen.

The Islamic Commonwealth (900s–1200s) By the time the ʿAbbasid Empire began to fall apart in the late ninth century, the regional powers that arose to take its place were led almost exclusively by Muslims. In other words, Islam had become firmly rooted in the conquered territories through conversion and intermarriage, such that the contraction of imperial control did not entail a recession of Islam, as might have occurred if the Umayyad Empire had disintegrated rather than being supplanted. On the contrary, local leaders and rebel movements saw fit to couch their political claims in Islamic terminology. This development facilitated conversion to local and regional forms of Islam under the potpourri of dynasties that succeeded the ʿAbbasids in the tenth and eleventh centuries and beyond. Most of these dynasties were led or backed by non-Arab Muslim groups: Berber peoples in North Africa, for example, and Iranian ones in Iraq and to its east. In some regions, new caliphates rose to power, such as the Arab Shiʿi Fatimids in North Africa and Egypt (909–1171), who claimed to be divinely guided descendants of the Prophet and whose core supporters were Berbers. Their missionaries fanned out across the Islamic world, winning converts in lands as distant as Yemen and South Asia. In other places, such as Northwest Africa under the Berber Almohad dynasty (1130–1269), non-Arab leaders laid their own claim to the title and religious authority of the caliphs.

Among the transformations of Islam in this era, however, none was more consequential than the conversion of the Turkic-speaking tribesmen on the frontiers of the Central Asian steppes. Turkish professional soldiers—many of them enslaved, converted, and manumitted—had already become indispensable in the armies of the ʿAbbasids, contributing both to the caliphs’ defense and to their estrangement from their Muslim subjects. But the conversion of intact Turkish tribes in the tenth and eleventh centuries transformed the politics and the geography of Islamic history.¹³ The Turkish Muslim Oghuz tribal confederation, led by the Seljuq clan, conquered Iran and Iraq from the east in the mid-eleventh century. The Seljuqs inflicted a serious defeat on the Byzantine army in 1071, opening Anatolia to further Muslim settlement. The growth of new expressions of Islam facilitated these developments.

Sufism, a term that encompasses a variety of experiential, ascetical devotional practices, was more accessible to many in the lower echelons of society than were the highly learned, abstract, and juristic forms of Islam that had been developed in the early Islamic cities. It flourished in the Seljuq domains.¹⁴ Seljuq rule did not last long, but it promoted a model of symbiosis among foreign military rulers, Muslim jurists, and Sufi holy figures that would be replicated for centuries in the central Islamic world. This model created conditions for further conversion to Islam. It entailed the maintenance of Muslim power, sometimes by dynasties of freshly converted slave soldiers, who consistently taxed and marginalized adherents of other religions; charismatic preaching by spiritual masters, increasingly with state support; and the stabilizing presence of Muslim scholars who advised sultans, competed with non-Muslim elites for patronage, and built an intellectual foundation of Islamic scholarship that provided ballast to Islamic societies.¹⁵ Amid the combined pressures and inducements that Islam thus presented, large demographic majorities from Morocco to Afghanistan may have become Muslim by the fourteenth century, even as Muslim rule on the fringes of the Mediterranean was pushed back on its heels by the growing power of European states.¹⁶

Sultans and Conquerors (1200s–1500s) As the Seljuq model spread within the Islamic world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, conquest and conversion were expanding the presence of Islam at and beyond the margins of Muslim political control. In West Africa, for example, Muslim traders and preachers in several regions persuaded local rulers to convert. These rulers thereby facilitated trade with the Mediterranean littoral, their own ability to draw on Muslim political ideology, and their capacity to recruit skilled Muslim scholars into their service, though their own subjects were often slower to profess Islam.¹⁷ In East Africa, Muslim traders had long settled along the coast and intermarried with local elites. Conversion there contributed to the formation of a hybrid Muslim Swahili culture, while military incursions by the rulers of Egypt eventually eroded Christian power inland, in Nubia and Sudan.¹⁸ South Asia, too, was invaded from the north after the tenth century, by ethnically Turkish, culturally Persian Muslim dynasties. There, the ruling elite and certain merchant and lower-caste groups, though never a demographic majority, adopted forms of Islam that were often heavily shaped by Sufism and open to covert synthesis with indigenous traditions.¹⁹ In Southeast Asia, particularly the peninsulas and archipelagoes of what are today Malaysia and Indonesia, Muslim traders and preachers managed to convert local elites beginning in the thirteenth century. As in West Africa, rulers in Southeast Asia found in Islam a means of accessing trade networks and expressing ideologies of competition with neighboring rulers, and there, too, Islam took on distinct local flavors.²⁰

Transformative conversion took place not only in lands invaded by Muslim armies but also among non-Muslim peoples who invaded territories long since peopled by Muslims. The Mongols who ruled Central Asia, Iran, and Iraq, which they had devastated by conquest in the mid-thirteenth century, converted amid great fanfare by the century’s end.²¹ Indeed, Islam spread by Sufis and merchants became the preeminent religion of Central Asia in the late medieval period and even won adherents in China.²² Only at the margins of Christian Europe—in Iberia and Sicily, for example—did Islam experience serious setbacks. But the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which in the early fourteenth century had consolidated the gains of Turkish raiders and tribesmen in Anatolia, became the preeminent military power in the Mediterranean and eastern Europe by the sixteenth century. Conversion among its numerous subject peoples, particularly in Anatolia but also in the Balkans, eastern Europe, and the Middle East, was integral to its success. A large proportion of the Ottoman ruling elite was recruited more or less involuntarily from among the children of Balkan Christians. These recruits converted to Islam as part of their professional training, and their subsequent patronage in their home territories facilitated further conversion.²³

Themes and Trends in Premodern Conversion to Islam

The Spiritual Appeal of Islam Islam held tremendous spiritual appeal for many converts in different places and times.²⁴ In the early generations after the Prophet’s death, when the armies of his followers were still conquering much of the ancient world, conversion was attractive precisely because it offered hope of joining God’s winning team. Indeed, there was no greater proof of the power or truth of the Muslim God than the victories He seemed to bestow on His followers on the battlefield.²⁵ One also wonders whether the simplicity and austerity of the Muslim God, coupled with the direct access to Him that believers were understood to enjoy, was particularly appealing.²⁶ This may have been especially true of converts from late antique societies—Christian and otherwise—in which conceptions of the divine were often complex, even bewildering to the average unlettered person. These were also societies in which the universe was thought to be filled with a range of intermediary beings between God and man, whether human agents, such as priests and saints, or supernatural agents, such as angels.²⁷ By contrast, as a largely nonclerical religion, and one that emphasized the direct connection between God and His creation, Islam could short-circuit the need for intercession (though Islam would develop its own cult of saints—both living and dead—in later centuries).²⁸ This sense of direct connection was supercharged by the radical otherness of the Muslim God, a deity who was at once immediately available to believers and also beyond human experience and understanding in certain ways.

The Qurʾān was also a major pull for prospective converts. Then as now, Muslims regarded their sacred text as the direct speech of God. It is an intensely allusive scripture, and the practice of reciting it in the original language had the effect of reenacting the original moment of revelation.²⁹ No less appealing for those who contemplated joining Islam was the figure of the Prophet Muḥammad himself. On the one hand, Muslims were adamant that he was a mere man, unlike Jesus Christ, whom Christians regarded as divine. On the other hand, God had created the Prophet as near to perfect as a man could be, making him attuned to the highest ideals and the smallest failures of the human condition. He was thus a model for his followers to emulate, near to them in condition, but just beyond what they could ever aspire to actually be.³⁰

On a practical level, Islam must have also been attractive because of its low barrier to entry. Formal conversion entailed the recitation of the shahāda (There is no god but God; Muḥammad is the Messenger of God), usually but not necessarily in the presence of witnesses.³¹ Conversion might entail certain signal changes, such as the adoption of a new name, documentary attestation before a judge, male circumcision, or emigration to a Muslim-majority settlement, but these were accidents, not essences of conversion. By contrast, in many forms of ancient Christianity, converts had to undergo lengthy rites of initiation, such as baptism and chrismation, as well as rigorous catechetical training, before they could formally join the church.³² The conversion process in Islam eventually acquired detail and formality, but these may not have been present at the beginning.³³

Not only was the process of conversion to Islam relatively straightforward, but many new Muslims found they did not necessarily have to give up their former practices. This was true in the first centuries among converts of Jewish and Christian backgrounds. Treasured forms of piety—such as fasting, the contemplation of sacred scripture, pilgrimage, belief in a looming judgment, and even devotion to certain biblical figures and saints—could easily survive the shift from the synagogue or the church to the mosque.³⁴ Finally, on a personal level, conversion to Islam seems to have been appealing thanks to its emphasis on solidarity among Muslims. The notion of a transregional umma, or community, that bound together believers of different kinds in distant places promoted a radical sense of equality among Muslims.³⁵

This last feature did not necessarily exist at the start of Islamic history amid the rancorous debates over the alleged superiority of Arabs during the Umayyad and ʿAbbasid periods.³⁶ As we have seen, non-Arab converts often entered the Muslim community as clients (mawālī) of particular tribes.³⁷ Such clientage was widespread in the early generations of Islam and guaranteed that Arabs would remain on top. But by the tenth century, as the umma became more heterogeneous, the practice of clientage-based conversion became obsolete.³⁸ Indeed, a sense of egalitarianism became a defining feature of many expressions of Islam and a benefit conferred by conversion.

The Social and Economic Appeal of Islam Second, there were numerous economic and social incentives to convert.³⁹ In the lifetime of the Prophet and the early caliphs, when the nascent Islamic state was bringing the tribes of Arabia and the Fertile Crescent to heel, it was the threat of violence and the prospect of security that drove large groups of Arabs to join the Muslim community.⁴⁰ The flip side of this coercive process was a factor that has already been mentioned—namely, conversion as a way of enjoying the fruits of victory on the battlefield. The coffers of the early Islamic state quickly swelled with the treasures of defeated empires, and conversion guaranteed new Muslims access to this conquest booty.

Even after the conquests were over, the same broad principle held true: conversion offered individuals and groups the chance to enjoy the social and economic life of the imperial upper class. This was especially so during the first centuries, when Muslims constituted an elite ruling over vast numbers of taxpaying, non-Muslim subjects. Seldom in the history of the world has there been a religion like Islam that promised so many material benefits to prospective converts while keeping the barrier to entry so low.⁴¹

The desire to maintain or increase one’s social status probably lay at the heart of many decisions to convert. We see this motive in the cases of various pre-Islamic elites who converted in the interest of staying on top in the new Islamic cosmos, whether they were Sasanian and Byzantine aristocrats in the seventh century, Sogdian princes in the ninth, Turkish chieftains in the eleventh, or Mongol warlords in the fourteenth. There were also many converts from servile or peasant backgrounds who embraced Islam in the hope of improving their otherwise miserable lots in life. This created a topsy-turvy world in which former members of the lower classes found themselves in positions of authority over former elites, who naturally resented the imbalance of power.

Over time, Muslims developed an elaborate legal system for maintaining a sense of hierarchy and distinction between themselves and their non-Muslim subjects, and many non-Muslims converted in the hope of escaping this structure. The most important of its elements were the special taxes levied on non-Muslims, including the jizya (poll tax). Conversion liberated non-Muslims from such burdens, which could have a debilitating effect on individuals and communities.⁴² More broadly, these laws effectively transformed non-Muslims into second-class citizens. The laws were cast in various literary forms, including the so-called Pact of ʿUmar, which has been studied extensively by scholars over the years.⁴³ There is considerable debate over whether the laws were actually enforced, and if so, whether they had a serious effect on non-Muslims in the long term. The consensus is that enforcement was highly variable, but that the laws contributed to the marginalization—and thus eventual conversion—of groups outside the Muslim fold.

Demographic and Regional Trends Third, what can we say about demographic and regional trends in the history of conversion during the Middle Ages? Written sources make clear that conversion followed different patterns, even within the same time period. For example, early biographies of the Prophet portray many individual conversions in Mecca and Medina, in which notable converts embraced Islam as a matter of conviction, often after transformative spiritual experiences. At the same time, the sources also describe many instances of group conversion, in which whole families, tribes, settlements, and cities went over to Islam en masse, often as a result of political, military, or economic pressures. Because the early sources were written and redacted some 150–200 years after the events they describe, it is difficult to peel apart the layers of history and legend in such accounts. Suffice it to say that while there were certainly early converts whose path into Islam resembled a modern, Protestant model of conversion—personal and life-changing—the majority of converts in the seventh and eighth centuries (and indeed at later points in Islamic history) may have entered Islam through far more collective, contingent, and nondoctrinal processes.⁴⁴

The history of conversion is also a history of sizable regional variation across the greater Islamic world.⁴⁵ Although reliable statistics are impossible to obtain for the premodern period, most scholars agree that certain areas of the Middle East crossed the threshold of a Muslim majority relatively early. These include the Arabian Peninsula, southern Iraq, and parts of the Iranian plateau, all of which witnessed mass tribal conversion and/or intensive Arab settlement at an early date. They contrast with areas that converted to Islam late and inconsistently, such as Egypt, greater Syria, and parts of northern Mesopotamia, which retained large pockets of Christians until modern times.⁴⁶ Here we must also remember that not everyone who converted to Islam became a Sunni Muslim, at least by the standards of the medieval scholars, largely based in cities, who have left behind the bulk of our written sources. Indeed, there were many areas that entered Islam via heterodox or nonimperial forms of the religion, such as the coastal mountains of Syria and Lebanon, where Druzes, ʿAlawīs, and Twelver Shiʿis flourish to this day; the highlands of northern Iran along the Caspian Sea, which became home to large Zaydī and Ismāʿīlī communities; and the remote oases and mountain valleys of North Africa, which became havens of Kharijism, the original sectarian movement in Islam.⁴⁷ This phenomenon reflects a tendency of many disenfranchised groups in the medieval Middle East—including the mawālī—to enter the Muslim community through various opposition movements. In such movements, ethnic, political, and cultural grievances toward the ruling class were expressed by embracing radical interpretations of Islam premised on protest and revolution.

Regional variation owes much to the circumstances of Islam’s arrival in a given area. In some places, conversion occurred in the wake of military conquests, as we see in the case of the central lands of the caliphate in the seventh and eighth centuries, Anatolia starting in the eleventh, and northern India in the thirteenth. If conquerors and their allies were the typical agents of conversion in predominantly non-Muslim lands, there are also examples of Muslim subjects converting non-Muslim rulers, as in the case of the Mongols.⁴⁸ In addition, we have many examples of conversion outside of imperial or postconquest settings. Oman, for instance, seems to have become predominantly Muslim early on, presumably because of contacts with western Arabia.⁴⁹ Finally, history provides numerous instances of conversion through commerce, including in parts of West Africa, Indonesia, and Malaysia; through the efforts of charismatic holy figures, such as Sufis among the Turkic tribes of the Central Asian steppe and in large parts of South Asia; and through Ismāʿīlī missionaries among remote mountain communities in Iran, Afghanistan, India, and elsewhere.⁵⁰

What should the reader take away from this broad survey of conversion and its themes in premodern Islamic history? First and foremost, conversion occurred across a broad spectrum of human experience. Indeed, this reader contains texts that portray conversion as a life-changing event, one that could cause individuals and groups to make a clean break between the old and the new. Other texts, meanwhile, portray conversion as something far messier, as a kind of fence-sitting in which a formal change of creed did not necessarily lead to the adoption of new identities, beliefs, or practices. The distinction leads into a bigger academic debate over whether it is better to understand conversion primarily as an event, isolated in time and leading to a visible change in status, or as a process enduring for years, if not generations, in which the old gradually becomes the new, and the new the old. Neither model categorically excludes the other, and both find support throughout the sources translated in this book.

MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY ON CONVERSION TO ISLAM

Conversion to Islam in premodern times has received considerable attention in contemporary academic scholarship, both in the context of broad historiographic accounts and in the form of focused thematic discussions. A survey of these studies reveals two overlapping trends: a highly diverse set of questions and methods with which scholars have approached the phenomenon of conversion to Islam and increasingly nuanced perceptions of the act of conversion itself.

When and Why

Two of perhaps the most salient questions that have featured, and still feature, in modern studies of conversion are when the major waves of conversion to Islam took place and what the reasons behind these conversions really were. Modern scholars have offered divergent estimates of the timing of the major waves of conversion, noting differences in rates in various parts of the broader Islamic world. At the root of this notable interest is the conviction that the emergence of a numerical Muslim majority in Islam-dominated lands constituted an important milestone. Modern scholars have gone as far as to argue that a Muslim majority led to the consolidation of Islamic political authority and social and religious institutions.⁵¹ Most recent estimates commonly theorize that in certain parts of the Middle East a Muslim majority was achieved as late as the fourteenth century. These quantitative estimates are based on assessments of the qualitative character of conversion to Islam, recognizing the progressive nature of the process and variations among nomadic, rural, and urban populations in different historical periods.⁵²

Conversion rates differed also on account of the varying motivations for conversion. Accordingly, attempts at quantifying conversion to Islam go hand in hand with efforts to establish the reasons that motivated it. The question has been addressed time and again in different contexts, all producing different explanations, many of which are the products of particular methods and perspectives. Conclusions have seemingly hinged on identifications of initiative on the part of either Muslims or non-Muslims. The former have been depicted as missionizing, preaching, drawing, inducing, or coercing, the latter as inspired, enchanted, opportunistic, dependent, culturally embedded, or communally feeble.⁵³ What spans most discussions, however, is the consensus view that individuals and groups chose to join the ranks of Islam for various reasons, but the prevailing circumstances in each historical moment rendered certain factors more prominent than others.

The question of motive is closely tied to that of agency. Thus, for example, some scholars have emphasized the importance of active proselytization in the initial spread of Islam, investigating the efforts of missionaries, preachers, spiritual heroes, and merchants in propagating the faith.⁵⁴ In instances when social pressures are seen to be at play, agency is often portrayed as coming from the direction of governmental officials.⁵⁵ But these explanations give the impression that pressure, at times violent and usually exerted by Islamic institutions, played an important role in winning converts and opposing confessional rivals. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to less formal levels of agency, taking place, among other locations, in popular centers of cult and within different social circles.⁵⁶ Moreover, converts themselves are also presented as important agents of conversion in their roles as prominent communal leaders, intellectuals, spouses, siblings, children, and slave owners whose conversion to Islam had an impact on their former coreligionist dependents.⁵⁷

How

The quest to determine the precise reasons for conversion to Islam, as well as the scale of the phenomenon in different periods, has been abandoned in more recent studies that advocate for the importance of examining the process of conversion, specifically the cultural and social mechanisms that facilitated or impeded conversion.⁵⁸ Recognizing the cultural diversity of the peoples who came under Muslim rule, these studies often portray conversion to Islam as an uneven process, an act that was either triggered or followed by different forms of acculturation, including the adoption of the Arabic language, Islamic naming practices, and dress codes.⁵⁹ Thus, for example, the conversion process that took place in garrison towns during the late seventh and early eighth centuries is often cast as a consequence of an initial phase of Arabization among non-Muslims. In other regions and in later periods, conversion to Islam is seen as occurring in lockstep with Islamization, the latter referring to the process whereby political, social, cultic, and other communal institutions took on an Islamic veneer. Here, the adoption of an Islamic confessional affiliation became a by-product of socialization.⁶⁰ Both acculturation and socialization speak to the progressive or gradual nature of conversion to Islam as a transformative act that was often slowed by former allegiances or sentiments. It is in this context that special attention has been given in modern scholarship to the phenomenon of backsliding, or conversion and reversion. The movement of converts back and forth between their former and new confessional communities highlights, among other things, their liminal position as well as their hybridity.⁶¹ Thus, the passage from one confession to another is also a process of transculturation that overrides definitions of formal communal affiliation.⁶²

Responses

The process of conversion to Islam was very much affected by the different responses that the act of conversion set in motion on the part of both the convert’s former coreligionists and his or her new ones. Perhaps the most tangible kind of response that has drawn the attention of modern scholarship came from the legal sphere. Legal regulations and opinions, of both Muslim and non-Muslim origin, reflect attempts to formalize the act of conversion and to regulate it on the part of Muslim jurists, to circumvent it on the part of non-Muslim legal authorities, and to address the variety of legal problems that arose in the course of, and following, the act.⁶³ These endeavors stemmed partially from the mistrust directed toward those who joined the Muslim fold and those who sought to revert back to their former religions. Modern scholars point to a variety of literary genres that expressed suspicions toward converts to Islam, questioning the sincerity of their motives and their integrity as Muslims.⁶⁴ Suspicion has been identified as contributing to a set of behaviors among converts as well as being emblematic of the liminal aspect of their position. In other instances, we find that the absence of a warm welcome to converts was also the outcome of a social hierarchy that was based on ethnic categories. Thus, for example, in the ninth to eleventh century, against the backdrop of Arab claims to primacy in the Muslim community, Iranian Muslims sought to retell the Islamic past in a manner that highlighted the role of their recently converted forefathers during the early conquests.⁶⁵ Other forms of cultural adaptation, albeit of a more mundane type, show up in al-Andalus, where conversion to Islam was accompanied by the adoption of a set of practices that emphasized the integration of converts into an Islamic-Arabian culture.⁶⁶ These are only a few of the examples that show up in modern scholarship with regard to the reactions converts received once they joined Muslim communities, and the measures they had to adopt in response. The latter are often seen as strategies of integration and assimilation in societies that frowned upon any compromise along confessional lines, yet at the same time witnessed a great deal of such compromise.

The liminal position of converts to Islam and the lack of trust they often encountered because of their suspected motives may have stemmed from fears of apostasy among many Muslims of the time. Although the theoretical side of the phenomenon has been long noted, recent research into documentary and narrative sources has brought the phenomenon to new historical light.⁶⁷ Apostasy is also attributed to the endurance of kinship ties between converts and their former coreligionists. The trend is evidenced in the so-called neomartyr acts that were composed in al-Andalus, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and the Caucasus and that speak of Christian converts to Islam whose reversion to Christianity was attributed to their continued ties with their Christian kinsfolk.⁶⁸ Such images find much resonance in legal sources of diverse confessional backgrounds.⁶⁹ The utility of these sources for reconstructing Islamic social history is particularly remarkable with regard to matters pertaining to the private domain. Legal sources speak of the overlapping and conflicting spheres of communal and family attachments. They underscore the dangers of apostasy as well as the opportunities for drawing apostates back to their communities. It is also in the context of lasting family ties that the central role of women has slowly come into view.⁷⁰ The importance of mothers, wives, and even sisters in conversion to Islam is gradually taking center stage in modern scholarship.

Impact and Significance

The evident links between conversion to Islam and broad trends such as Islamization, Arabization, and the consolidation of Islamic political power as well as the more minute aspects of daily life justify exploring its broad effects. The significance of conversion to Islam in the formation of Islamic society has already been noted with regard to the continuous interest in the chronological tipping point leading to a numerical Muslim majority. The underlying premise is that conversion to Islam was to a great extent a social act that, with time, gave the Muslim community its distinctive character.⁷¹ In order to accommodate the social, cultural, and even spiritual sentiments of those who joined the Muslim ranks, Islam as a religion was in a constant state of flux.⁷² Other effects, of a more local scale, have been noted as well. Thus, in the case of Egypt, scholars have argued that the slower pace of conversion facilitated wide-scale Arabization, in contrast to instances in which bilingualism persisted owing to faster rates of conversion.⁷³ At the same time, in Iran, where Islam spread at a much earlier stage, yet local Iranian culture continued to flourish, conversion to Islam is seen to have encouraged a unique